Cowboys vets will see plenty of snaps in preseason

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones made it clear the team’s veterans will be taking plenty of snaps in the preseason.

Under normal circumstances, the exhibition games belong to younger players and rookies. But the lockout changed all that.

“Because we haven’t been working together as a team,” Jones said, “there are going to be more veterans playing in the preseason. They’ve got to. That’s going to be where they get their reps. And certainly we’re going to have to take these rookies and cleverly incorporate them into what we’re going to be about. This preseason games could be very interesting to fans. I’m just saying there’s a positive that puts a little additional twist on these preseason games that hasn’t been there in the past.”

Coach Jason Garrett also signaled that the preseason could mean work for the veterans.

“I think the thing that we all have to remember is we lost a lot of reps in the offseason,” Garrett said. “We lost OTA days. We lost minicamp days.”

But Garrett wasn’t quite ready to go as far as Jones.

“As we work through it, we’ll be more candid about how we’re going to play these preseason games,” he said. “Really, what we want to do is get in the flow of training camp, see how it’s going and understand within these new rules what kind of work we’re getting, and then we’ll adjust accordingly once the games come around.”